Bryn Mawr Classical Review 04.02.04

The subject of Gross's monograph is the fantasy of animated statues in
Western literature and visual arts from antiquity to the present. The
theme of the animated statue (the category is not restricted here to
moving statues or statues showing other signs of life, but includes even
those that, or who, are only presumptively quick) is widespread and
important. It invites consideration of obviously weighty conceptions such
as mimesis, creation, life, and death. It also raises a number of
significant methodological concerns for the study of art and literature
that range from squabbles over disciplinary territory to the more
interesting question of the ways in which scholarship is tied to culture.
Historians of art and literature alike would welcome a synthetic
treatment of the material and its rival interpretations. Gross's book,
however, is disappointing in conception, expression, and content.

Ten
chapters in four Parts are framed by a Preface and a Coda. The Preface
(xi-xiv) establishes an ambitious agenda: to examine the idea of the
animated statue and its treatment from antiquity through the present, as
well as to attempt (xi) "to describe the often ambiguous sources of such
fantasies"; and further, to consider "fictive statues" in a wide range of
poetry, prose, drama, and film, in addition to psychoanalytic thought and
the philosophy of Wittgenstein. The book (xii) "takes the
form of a series of linked critical meditations.... [O]verall the
argument unfolds in a rather disjunctive fashion, often circling back on
itself.... It is an approach that I hope will reveal, more effectively
than any straightforward survey, the sources of the fantasy's complexity
and power." Some "heterogeneous examples" are cited (xiii)
as "parts of a rough order of ideas and questions which it is the aim of
this book to clarify as much as possible." The faux-naïf stance
cannot
excuse the fact that as the chapters "shift," "revolve," and "dwell,"
there is neither clarification nor clarity.

The major failure is
one of
method. In an effort to drive home the obvious points that the theme of
the animated image is complex, and that no single explanation is really
satisfactory, Gross simply jettisons analytic categories in favor of an
undifferentiated mass of phenomena. To the extent that some of the
customary approaches, such as "taxonomies" (84) that categorize signs of
animation in statues (speech, motion, and so forth), simply miss the point
that the problem is first and foremost a literary one, Gross is right to
reject them. He chooses, however, not to replace them: everything having
to do with statues seems to dissolve into everything else. It apparently
makes no difference whether a statue moves on its own, or is brought to
life or caused to move, or never shows any sign of animation at all;
whether it speaks spontaneously, or is made to speak as a sentient
being, or given words "as if" it lived; whether it was made to represent
a god or a mortal, or came to be through some event of petrifaction.
Everything reflects a concept that seems central to the book:
"statueness." (On p. 169 is a discussion of "what one might call the
'statueness of statues'," but the word is used earlier without
qualification or quotation marks.) This construct is made to transcend
space, time, and culture. It is applied equally in present-day contexts
informed by a long critical tradition of investigating the nature of
images and in situations like that of classical Greece, for which we have
yet to understand even the basic system of terminology for images. This
approach also mistakes for universal possibilities and alternatives a
range of attitudes that are in fact strongly determined by culture and
ideology. For example, an early Christian iconoclast sees the Greek
statues of the gods as objects packed with real demons poised to spring,
while a contemporary follower of traditional religious practices finds
such a belief to be a hopelessly unsophisticated misunderstanding of
images. The discourse of the late classical iconoclastic controversy is
thus caught perpetually in an endless mutual fallacy of irrelevant
conclusion: "The statues are not gods!" "We never thought they were." To
apply to every context the theoretical constant of "statueness" is to beg
the fundamental question.

It is unclear what, if any, system of
interpretation governs Gross's analyses. Some explanations seem
to be offered merely as specimens illustrating the place of statues
within specific analytical structures; others may be genuinely accepted.
Sometimes Gross embraces a hybrid approach. For example (33), "While I do
not assume that my own critical figures can
entirely absorb the technical distinctions of psychoanalysis, or leave
them undistorted, there are some aspects of the psychoanalytic picture of
the mind that I would invoke here as a way
of gaining a purchase on our phantasmic intimacy with the sculpted
image."

In striving "to make a place for intuitions that
seem to me somewhat alien to the ways others have spoken about sculpture"
(169), Gross also brooks no interference from the established categories
of literary analysis. For example, he deliberately uses "ekphrasis" to
mean not simply "formal, literary descriptions of real or fictive works of
art" (141), but also (234, n. 3) "those poems in which the work is
fictively lent a voice, or 'speaks out,' the etymological sense of
'ekphrasis.'" This derivation may be accepted by the Oxford English
Dictionary2 ("f. E)KFRA/ZEIN f. E)K out + FRA/ZEIN to
speak"), but it is not quite accurate. The basic sense of the root is "to
point out, show" (LSJ9 cites Aristarchus for the absence of the
sense
"say, tell" in Homer); there is much in favor of Eva C. Harlan's
conclusion that the connotation of the prefix is "in detail" or "fully"
(for E)/KFRASIS and E)KFRA/ZEIN see her dissertation "The
Description of Paintings as a Literary Device and Its Application in
Achilles Tatius," Columbia University, 1965, 45-51). Gross uses the false
etymology to justify stretching the notion of ekphrasis beyond any sense
or usefulness. When the net is flung over the entire sea, one can hardly
claim a catch.

It may be, of course, that despite repeated
re-readings I
have misunderstood Gross's text. His writing is opaque, laden with jargon
carelessly used, and clogged with rhetorical questions, qualifications,
and restatements; often the sense collapses wearily under the burden of
superficial erudition. His style is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot at his worst
(31): "The statue's saving feature is perhaps that it
shows the inevitable bondage of our abstractions to some fantasy of the
body's life and may thus help us reknow or relocate that life, though it
may also do violence to both the life of the body and the different life
of those forms we may need or wish to conceive of as without a body, as
hovering within or outside the body." Terms like
"interiority," "thingness," "facticity," and the like will induce the
kick-screams in readers in tolerant of critspeak.

In theory, bad
writing
can conceal good ideas. One place to test the value of Gross's
contribution is in his "close readings of individual texts" (xii). I
comment here on three examples that are relevant to the study of ancient
statuary.

In presenting Shelley's "Ozymandias," (51-52), Gross
prints the
Norton, holograph, text, correct to the last dash and "desart". Nowhere,
however, in the discussion of "the residue of power, the presence of a
kind of deathly life, still clinging to this abandoned, hearsay statue"
does he take any notice of Shelley's quite central emphasis on the
sculptor. The statue did not just grow; the frown and sneer explicitly
tell what the sculptor did, and that he did it successfully. The
desolation continues,
in a sense, the process of mockery begun by the sculptor's hand. I do not
see how the sonnet can be read, even for the sake of emphasizing
"statueness," as if the artist did not exist; a draft of the poem shows
that "some sculptor's art" was a component from the first (Rogers II, p.
320).

The reading of another crucial text, Rilke's famous
"Archaïscher
Torso Apollos" (152-154), is also unsatisfactory. The first line of the
sonnet, "Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt," is inexplicably
rendered, in the translation Gross prints and follows, as "We cannot know
his legendary head": "There is something lost, a head that we cannot know
-- though this is converted into the lost truth of a legend, rather than
merely a lost piece of stone." The "legend" is the translator's attempt
to supply some fuller sense for "unheard", but "we cannot know" is simply
a mistranslation of the past tense, "we did not know." Gross interprets
the poem in terms of a "loss [that] must be made more than
contingent, converted into a form of sufficiency or completeness....
[T]his demand itself forces us to certain strange, perhaps desperate,
questions about what drives such compensatory fictions, what it is they
restitute." The whole point of the poem, however, is
precisely the opposite of any such inability to know and any such need for
compensation: that is, we did not know, but we can know, and do
come to
know, the gaze and the smile of the lost head. They shine out from
the
torso, glowing and expanding. The theme is transfiguration. The full
effect of the mistranslation becomes apparent in Gross's comments on
another poem from the summer of 1908, "Leichen-Wäsche," which offers
such
significant parallels to the sonnet that it ought to have been
paraphrased, if not printed. Two women are washing the corpse of an
unknown man. At the point at which they have washed his neck, "they knew
nothing of his fate, so they concocted another, washing
without stopping. Then one woman had to cough, so laid the heavy vinegar
sponge on his face." The face of the corpse is covered, but his hand
succeeds in indicating that he no longer thirsts. The women hastily finish
their task. "And the nameless one lay
bare and clean there and legislated (und gab Gesetze)." Gross's reading
compounds his misinterpretation of the sonnet: "Splendid
and innate as it [sc. the archaic torso] seems, the statue's 'life'
is
no
less uncanny, no less strangely lent and displaced, than that of the
nameless corpse in 'Corpse-washing' ('Leichen-wasche' [sic]) ...
where the care, attendant grooming, but also the residual fear,
embarrassment,
and ignorance of its attendants transform a dead body into a thing that
lies in state and 'gives commands' (though exactly to whom, and to what
larger end, we cannot know)." This psychoanalytic
rationalization fails even to acknowledge what process it is that must be
explicated. One must work hard not to understand the corpse who is not
thirsty for a drink of vinegar as a figure of Christ; not to see that the
living can give nothing to the corpse (even the story they make up about
him is immediately succeeded by the symbol of his true individual
destiny); not to grasp that in these poems we are presented with two
transfigurations that leave the past behind and reshape the future by the
power of the commands of the Christ-figure and the final pronouncement of
the sonnet: "You must change your life." Gross's templates of
"compensatory fictions" and "the statueness of statues" do as much
violence to Rilke's spiritual conception of the process of artistic
creation as do the kinds of positivistic analyses he rejects.

Gross's
reading of The Winter's Tale (100-109) follows the lead of those
who
analyze the play in terms of the story of Pygmalion rather than Euripides'
Alcestis (for the suggestion that Shakespeare may have known
George
Buchanan's translation of the Alcestis, see Martin Mueller,
"Hermione's
Wrinkles, or, Ovid Transformed: An Essay on The Winter's Tale,"
Comparative Drama 5 [1971-1972] 230 and n. 6). The Alcestis
is
the
obvious
and closer comparison, but it raises issues that Gross chooses to ignore.
In this discussion and the several of Pygmalion, he treats the animation
of the statues and the associated aspects of "statueness" without taking
into account the central feature of these stories: women are the statues,
and women are animated and re-animated. Although Gross notes elements such
as "misogyny and idealization" (100), probes the psychology of Pygmalion's
disaffection with women and his awakening love, and rehearses the many
interpretations of Leontes' jealousy, suspicion, envy, and guilt, such
analyses in fact simply continue the very conventions of gender that give
rise to the narratives. Men's preference for images of women rather than
women as they are and men's power
to impose these images on women are taken to be so natural to the order
of things that they are left unnoticed, beneath critical attention. It
must be emphasized that to recognize that these stories touch the heart of
a vast and invidious sexual inequality does not by any means require a
feminist perspective. One need only look at Lawrence Durrell's novel
Nunquam, not included in Gross's panorama, to find in the
fabrication/revival of the dead Iolanthe an explicit exploration of the
special relationship between women and statues that proceeds from quite
different assumptions. Gross's decision not to acknowledge these stories
as reflecting conceptions of gender leaves intact a prejudicial structure
in the guise of a neutral critical stance. One cannot help noticing that
almost no voices of women intrude on Gross's meditations. Among the
writers and artists whose works receive attention I find only Mary
McCarthy, "who describes beautifully the grave interanimations of
Florentine sculpture and Florentine politics" (175). Beautiful thoughts,
no doubt, but not likely to expose the spurious neutrality of
"statueness." There is no place in Gross's study of the fantasy of the
animated statue for Sylvia Plath, for example, much of whose work explores
the theme, and who, in the eight pentastichs of "The Applicant," strips
bare the immemorial myth of Pygmalion: "in twenty-five years
she'll be silver, / In fifty, gold. / A living doll, everywhere you
look. / It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk.... You
have an eye, it's an image. / My boy, it's your last resort. / Will you
marry it, marry it, marry it."

In general, Gross adds little but
confusion to the work of the scholars he cites. The book is all the more
disappointing because a good treatment of the subject -- especially one
originating in the study of literature, which is Gross's field -- would be
important for the current debate over the scope and methodology of the
history of art. One form of resistance to the new interpretive approaches
in art history is a refusal to admit any role for literature beyond a
simplistic kind of documentation existing to the side of ostensibly
empirical observations on objects. Why ignorance of one field should be
thought to enhance competence in another is not altogether clear, but the
attitude does exist. Animated statues are a topic that lies unquestionably
with in the boundaries of art history and is at the same time an
unquestionably literary problem. Spontaneously living statue or
intricately crafted automaton, the animated figure takes its bearings from
the expectations generated and developed by the ways people think and
talk about images. The extensive secondary literature cited by Gross shows
that the most productive work on the question of images has always
resulted from the crossing of disciplinary lines. We may rejoice that it
will not prove easy either
to restore the old barriers or to raise new ones.

Cries of
happiness are
likely, however, to fade on the lips of progressive historians of ancient
art, a field traditionally so inimical to interpretive theory that the
reactionary backlash finds few targets within it. Interest in the kinds
of central, indeed pressing, questions met in Gross's book is customarily
dismissed as unsound and unworthy of the serious student. The conventions
of archaeology and of the history of ancient art foster the illusion of
direct apprehension of images and consequently of the possibility of an
authentic and objective understanding of them, unmediated by theoretical
or interpretive bias. Explicit discussion of what the ancients thought
their images were, as images, or what we think today, is virtually
nonexistent. One of the few examples is the eminent archaeologist Ernst
Buschor's Vom Sinn der griechischen Standbilder of 1942, with its
sincere
but regrettable commitment to notions like the "Lebenssphäre der
seienden
Wirklichkeit" and the "griechisch-nordischer Urgeist." It is a pity that
this work does not figure in Gross's study; a comparison of Buschor's
description of the fiery gazes streaming dominantly and brilliantly from
the faces of Geometric figures with Rilke's visions of animation and
transfiguration would have gone far to illustrate how deeply classical
scholarship is embedded in its cultural and intellectual matrix.

We
are
not yet entirely free from the influence of Buschor's style of mysticism,
but its overt
expression in that particular book appears to have discouraged two
generations of scholars from asking basic questions about Greek statues.
What has flourished instead is a structure of categories and taxonomies
applied without distinction to archaeological artifacts and literary
constructs. For example, maps plot the distribution of "xoana",
even
though these images are known only from literary texts -- texts in which
the meaning of the word varies drastically according to context. A similar
case is that of BAI/TULOS, long recognized as a late term
restricted to a specific type of animated stone. Both the word and the
testimonia about "baetyls" have, however, regularly been applied to a much
broader range of material and have long been used to "reconstruct"
primitive aniconic practice. Much nonsense about the origins of sculpture
has been written as a result of this willful misuse of the texts;
nonetheless, the inaccurate construct is consistently preferred in
archaeological scholarship even now.
If we wish to understand how the Greeks thought about statues, we must
not do violence to their categories and terms.

At every level our
understanding of ancient statuary rests on texts: vocabulary, information,
interpretation. We need to keep in mind the kinds of issues raised in
Gross's book, but we need to be much more careful in dealing with
them.